


aliens exist

by jeannedarc



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: M/M, au - mark doesn't know how dogs work, is the title literal or not?, mentions of depression, we might never know ;)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:20:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22011724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: It's so rare that Yuta finds someone who sees the sleepy college town in which he lives the same way he does, rarer still that someone might be kind enough to remind him of the few things he loves about it. The mysteriously missing owner of a journal does both.
Relationships: Lee Taeyong/Wong Yuk Hei | Lucas, Mark Lee/Nakamoto Yuta
Comments: 25
Kudos: 137





	aliens exist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RefugeRen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RefugeRen/gifts).



> a birthday gift for [the love of my life](https://twitter.com/TimbersShivered). happy (belated) birthday, baby. i hope you like reading this as much as i loved writing it for you.

He doesn't mean to find it, tucked beside the computer in the mostly-empty lab, like a present waiting to be opened though it's not the right date quite yet. The end of the day had come too quickly, and Yuta isn’t sure that he’s deserving of a gift, but he picks up the journal anyway. It's leather-bound, beautiful, cracks along the spine where it's been broken into so many times. Yuta can't help himself when he drags his fingertips over the cover, the gold embossing it with a name, a designation: _important plans_. This journal, he knows, has an owner, a home to get back to. He lifts it to his face, breathes in the scent of well-worn pages; it smells of something beautiful, something indescribable, of ink and love the likes of which he cannot fathom.

He cannot say with any degree of honesty that he’s ever been so much as _liked_ as much as this book, which radiates with affection. He certainly cannot confess he’s never once been loved.

A collector of journals and books himself, Yuta must admit: it's a fine specimen. He'd be remiss not to find the owner immediately, if only to ask them where they'd found it. He covets it for longer than he'd like to admit, tucking it beneath his arm as he pushes his cart of returns back round the corner only to disappear into the stacks.

Occasionally, he'll stop, press the leather to his cheek, its surface cold where he is warm. He's always been told, by every single ex he's ever entertained, that he burns like a furnace when he touches, like there's something magical lurking beneath his skin. The last person to share his bed had hated it, fled in the middle of the night to avoid the excess contact. He wonders, briefly, while he thumbs over the edges of the pages of this beloved diary, what that man is doing now, whether or not he's still happy with his husband.

Yuta shelves books for a living -- among other things, of course; a library assistant's job is never done, or so he tells himself when he arrives every evening to his tiny, empty home. Even this far from the city's center, he finds that he catalogues more books than he's comfortable with. Not that it matters. Not many people come in to see them.

The journal is in his bag now, a gesture of spite considering the enormous stack of books at Yuta’s bedside waiting to be read or returned. He'd done the wrong thing, and the guilt of it lingers with him even as he makes himself dinner. What he should have done, and what his coworkers will tell him was the correct procedure tomorrow when he finally works up the nerve and the right words to confess his crime, was put it back where he found it or, worst case scenario, drop it off in the lost and found bin that no one has looked at in the better part of a decade.

It's sitting in the bottom of his bag.

Yuta wants so badly to fall in love with it, but the idea of invading someone's privacy isn't one that he can stomach.

At least, not without eating the meal he's made himself.

He's halfway through a second helping of pasta and sauce and vegetables when the urge, the itch that has settled in his nail beds, overwhelms him. He pauses whatever bullshit he's watching on Netflix, and goes to the hook by the front door.

The draft in the house, he notes, is getting worse. He'll have to call someone to get it taken care of, though he's not sure what that entails. It doesn't matter; the secrets of another person will keep him warm.

The strap on the journal makes a satisfying sound when Yuta pops it up, scrunched up in the very corner of his too-big couch. The noise, in fact, echoes along the empty walls, a soundtrack to his misdeeds. He relishes this, too, though again, he knows that he should not, that he has no business prodding into someone's private life.

"Who are you?" he asks the book, and then immediately turns bright red, turns on the documentary so no one who might be listening by some supernatural means might think he's sitting alone, talking to himself.

The first page, a flyleaf, is covered in numbers. Not mathematical figures, arithmetic that might make Yuta numb to whatever else he might find. No, it resembles more closely a cipher, something meant to be decoded should the wrong -- _or right_ , he tells himself, a poor attempt at reassurance -- brain put himself to the task. He distracts himself by turning the page, and he is thrilled at what he finds.

The first entry is a photograph, not of people, not of nature, but of the tallest building in town. Mediocre by national standards, but something this person saw was so beautiful that they had to lay down on the ground at the building's feet, catch it as it reached its pointed spire to the sky. It seemed to pierce the clouds.

Perhaps it _is_ beautiful. Yuta has never considered it, having lived here for a great many years, but perhaps by seeing it through someone else's eyes, it is.

The entry beneath, written in a perfectly round script, is in a language Yuta does not know, nor have the patience to run through Google Translate. Not that he has much expectation that it would work anyway, he all too cognisant of the string of binary that had led him into this adventure. He turns the page again, careful not to tear, treating it with the same delicate touch he might one of the older volumes at work.

So too is the second entry: more photographs of buildings. Yuta must wonder, tucking his feet beneath himself so as to stave off the cold slowly filling his home, whether or not he's simply stumbled upon someone's college photography course project. "Who are you..." he asks again, grateful that the sound of presidential campaigning, shot from the inside, is there to muffle his question.

This building is, funnily enough, the local college campus. It's sleepy, an early morning, covered in a light mist characteristic of the late spring and early summer, when the rains are just starting to pick up in the darkness of the nighttime. He admires it, can almost feel the fog rolling over his face. He’s always been a fan of leaving home early not just for work reasons but simply to experience the outdoors before the rest of the world has rolled out of bed for the day.

The sprawl of the campus from which Yuta had graduated not that long ago is also beautiful, something he hadn't managed to notice when he'd been attending classes there. Most of his memories now are of late nights in that library (as opposed to his own, of course), of cram sessions that had amounted to very little, of wrinkles developing in his roommate-turned-friend-with-benefits' forehead far before their time. He wonders whether or not he should call Jaehyun, see what he's been up to. It'd be a nice change of pace.

That distraction in mind, Yuta carefully sets down the journal, sliding its band around its outer edges with a reverence that he usually reserves for books he truly loves, and people he finds it in himself to care about. His second helping sits at the edge of his faux-marble table, growing colder by the minute.

He thinks, not for the first time today, that things would be so much easier to cope with should he have at least one person who came over consistently. But he's long since chased away anyone who might care that much about him that they'd invite themselves into his own space.

Longing seeps in through the cracks in his façade, the one he only chances to lower when he's well and truly alone. He goes to bed cold, wrapped in too many blankets, the remainder of his dinner left to rot until morning when he finally has the ambition enough to wash the dishes.

///

Taeyong is certainly not pleased, once Yuta makes his proper confession. "I can't believe you'd steal something from someone like that," he says, all stiff upper lip and dark, serious eyes. Yuta knows better, has been working with Taeyong long enough to know that this is just his job, that management looks good on Taeyong because he's just a good an actor as the people in the films over which he obsesses, and that he's got twice as many chops as his favourite vintage starlet ever could.

"I didn't steal," Yuta points out, stamping return by date cards just to keep his hands busy. It isn't as if they need them; there's an enormous stack waiting to be used just beside the sole computer used for checkouts. "Did anyone come asking for it?"

Taeyong makes an even worse face, now, and Yuta has to laugh, can't help himself. "It's stealing because it isn't yours, and what if someone _does_ come asking for it? How can I possibly explain to someone that their missing property can't be given right back to them because it's _at my librarian's house_?"

Yuta laughs even harder at this. "Listen, just because you don't believe in moral grey, or debate, or conversation, doesn't mean that you have to force that opinion on me." His stack completed, he moves on to organising the returns, few and far between as they are, the ones that are meant to go back to other libraries in systems closer to the main of town on their own rolling rack.

In his rush to yank the books from Yuta's hands, give him a third, even _more_ pressing look, Taeyong bashes his ankle against the protruding metal nut on the cart's wheel. He makes a sound that could be mistaken for a howl, were one some sort of animal amateur. Yuta, though, just laughs some more, if only to see the lack of composition in Taeyong's posture, the way he sags in an attempt to grab hold of the site of his wound.

"Do you need to sit down?" he asks, enjoying his boss' -- no, his only friend's -- pain far too much for the act not to have some deep, psychological root that Yuta does not care to investigate. "Here, sit. I'll go find you some ice."

"We're out of ice," groans Taeyong, sitting anyway, taking the seat behind the desk, propped against the doorway to the back room where the interlibrary loans are delivered. "Ran out this morning. One of the volunteers wanted iced coffee. Who the hell drinks iced coffee in winter?"

Yuta shrugs. "Probable satan-worshippers," he answers without much thought. "Should I go to the store?"

"Do _not_ ," and here Taeyong is grave, eyeing Yuta up and down, gaze lingering on the large pin on the lapel of his casual jacket, "go to the store. The last time you went to the store, I didn't see you for forty-five minutes, and you swore you were just talking to someone but then I found out later you'd gotten yourself a date and a handy new smoking habit."

"It's not my fault that I don't get breaks. The volunteers get breaks." Yuta tugs at the hem of his jacket, suddenly self conscious about it -- had pink been a bad idea? He'd vascillated back and forth between his options this morning before finally settling on the confidence required to wear spring in the winter. That matter settled, he reaches into his hair, tightens his ponytail.

Taeyong watches all this like a hawk, and smiles. "The volunteers are in _high school_ , and I'd really appreciate you being _nice_ to them instead of telling them library science horror stories that you made up because you were bored."

Yuta has never been bored in his life. "I'm not bringing the journal back unless someone asks for it."

"You're bringing it back tomorrow," sighs Taeyong, still smiling, "because knowing you, you took it home and read all of it."

Though some part of it is deniable, Yuta doesn't bother trying, loving himself too much to engage Taeyong, of all people, in debate about moral greys, or reasons why Yuta must savour this beautiful and astonishing contribution to the world.

///

That evening, Yuta goes to the dog park. The snow hovers overhead; he doesn't think much of it, used to the cold, used to the temperament of people when it gets that way. They'd much rather not be outside, playing fetch with Fido, and Yuta...

Well, Yuta just likes things that are alive, which is more than he can say for most of the people by whom he's surrounded, who had long since given up. The blanket of sleep that had covered this town some many years before his sudden arrival hasn't lifted in his time. Even the coffee seems to force everyone to dozing off.

That doesn't stop him from dog-watching, though, all too aware that his landlord would pitch a fit if he tried to bring an animal into the house, and that he couldn't afford the deposit anywhere else, anyhow. There's a sprightly young man at the edge of it all, pleading with his dog like he's never met one before, and Yuta can't help but take pity on him. He jogs in the direction of the hapless dog owner and his equally unhelpful spaniel mix, his breath an enormous plume that masks him on his approach.

He crouches when he reaches his destination, all the way on the other side of the pond. He'd taken long enough that a small flock of ducks have gathered on the edge of the water, a rest stop for them and an opportunity play for the dog. It's a cockapoo. A ridiculous excuse for a dog -- not that Yuta can say much of anything in that regard; he's always been a fan of the small and frilly breeds -- with way too much energy for a first-time owner. "Hi there," he says, as if ignorant of the dog's very human owner, watching on with great consternation, a distance that cannot be measured lingering behind his narrowed eyes. "What's your name? Do you want to be friends?"

He offers his closed fist, and the dog trots closer on its short legs. Yuta, for one, is endeared. The owner attached to the dog does not seem to feel quite the same way.

"Hi there," he says again, a breathy whisper now that he's caught up to his body in a way that makes sense. Too many long days trapped inside the library. He'll have to present the theory to Taeyong tomorrow during his shift. "Hi, it's really nice to meet you." It comes out something like a song, a lullaby. He glances up at the owner. "You seemed a little out of your depth. Is that true?" It's a cautious question, punctuated by a cold nose pressed to his knuckles.

"Yes," agrees the owner, maybe a little stiffly, as if he's interacting with another human being for the very first time in his entire life. A feat, to be sure; he doesn't look very young, after all.

"That's okay." Yuta means it reassuring, bites his lip to keep from saying more in case it veers condescending instead. It strikes him just a moment too late that, beneath the hunter's cap, the layers of clothes meant to fend off the winter chill, the owner of this stupid, loving dog is quite cute. Handsome, even, though Yuta wouldn't be bold enough to say after petting without permission. A punishable crime, to be sure. He colours all the way up to the tips of his ears, though he'll blame it on the weather. "Not everyone can be natural with dogs. Is he your first?"

"She's my second," corrects the owner, a bit softer this time, as if the intrusion has suddenly become welcome. Yuta finds he likes hearing that, that he's allowed to encroach upon this space, and straightens up. The cockapoo sniffs at his ankles, and makes a happy yipping noise when it tugs on his shoelace with its teeth. "Hi. It's nice to meet you. I'm Mark." The owner extends his hand in greeting, and Yuta eyes it suspiciously.

"I'm not going to shake your hand," he says slowly, "because I forgot my gloves, see, and I don't want to freeze you the first time we touch."

Mark, the dog owner, the absolute cutie, just laughs, but it's an almost mechanical sound, something practised in a mirror when one is home alone. Yuta doesn't want to admit it, but he can relate to that more than most people might be able to.

"I'll save it," promises Mark, a little grin still tugging at his mouth, and god, he's so cute like that. It almost isn't fair. Almost.

Yuta flashes him a smile right back, breathing steam from between his brilliant teeth. "What's her name?"

Mark's smile fades, just a touch, until it, too, is wooden and practised. Yuta wonders, just briefly, if he's done something wrong. "She doesn't have one yet," he admits, glancing away in the direction of the ducks squawking their presence like the troublesome bastards they are. "She's brand new. I was waiting until something seemed right."

Yuta nods. He knows the struggle, names being important designations for lifelong companions. He stoops, takes the dog's head in his hands, looks her in her eyes with great intent, and focuses. It will come to him, he knows that to be certain.

But it doesn't, and that's the trouble.

He glances up at Mark, brow knitted with concern for his own ability, his failure to make good on a promise he technically had yet to make. "Maybe we should go for a walk," he suggests, "while I try and think of something."

"You want to name my dog?" Mark raises an eyebrow, and he's so bright when he smiles, even when there's something off about it.

"This is now my dog by proxy," announces Yuta as he stands once more. "I'm going to have to go to animal parent court so we can work out joint custody. From now on, whenever I'm at the dog park, I want to at least be able to say hi."

If it's weird, Mark doesn't say anything. That's for the best, Yuta figures, brushing his hands on the thighs of his jeans. His pink jacket, he notices, has a gentle tuft of dog hair at the cuff.

Mark brushes it away for him, quicker than lightning, the movement almost unnatural in how smoothly it happens. "I think I can live with that," he says.

The unnamed dog leading the way, they circle the pond a couple times in quiet. Yuta physically removes their new charge from the group of ducks, unsure as to who's more threatening to whom and unwilling to find out. He thinks he sees worry in Mark's eyes, just a flash of it, but doesn't say anything, in case Mark is one of those all too common people who doesn't take kindly to having their emotional states called out in public spaces. No, instead he sidles up to Mark, shoulder to shoulder, an excuse for casual contact. He's always told he's been good at words, but there's nothing quite like good old fashioned body language to get the point across.

After all, it'd be foolish of him to pretend he doesn't want Mark in his bed, if not tonight then at least in the near future. Anyone that cute with that cute a dog deserves a little more attention than can be given at sundown in a very, very public park.

"What do you do for a living?" he asks, when the silence becomes too much to bear.

Mark shrugs. "I do research."

That makes sense. The only thing out here is the college, after all; even those who have graduated seem to end up trapped between its teeth, unable to wedge themselves from the gap. Had he not found a position at the public library, Yuta would have probably found himself enmeshed there in the same way. "What kind of research?"

"Social sciences," Mark says after a moment's hesitation. Funny how he seems to have to think about this, but not about whatever witty banter he's engaging in when Yuta brings it up. Yuta tucks this information into the back of his mind, a file cabinet collecting dust. It's been awhile since he's done his own research, met anyone new. Hard to feel like there are connections left to be made when the town is small enough that everyone knows everyone's business. The pause goes on a little too long and, at last, Mark ventures to ask, "What do _you_ do?"

"Oh, I work at the library," says Yuta with a wave of his hand. He loves what he does, make no mistake, but it's a sleepy job for sleepy people, and he's always his most awake outside the four walls of his job.

"The one next door to the little café with the really good muffins?" asks Mark, eyes alight with true interest for the first time since they'd met a solid half hour ago.

"That's the one." Yuta grins. "I love those muffins, too." He wonders if that is all it takes to make new friends, sharing interest in baked goods, but then he hasn't been trying to figure out the formula for very long.

The ducks at the pond take flight at last, honking their departure, as if bidding the dog, and Yuta and Mark in turn, an unhappy goodbye. Yuta, for what it's worth, is sad to see them go, though he doesn't have any truly viable reason why.

It strikes him, lightningesque, and he nearly bows over himself in an attempt to get it out all at once. "Duck," he says, glancing at the dog and, he's sure, earning a questioning glance from Mark. "The dog's name is Duck."

And Mark seems to like that well enough, dropping to his knees in the gently-dewy grass, the temperature dropping as the sun does below the horizon, eclipsed by the few buildings this side of town has to offer. "Duck," he says, doing as Yuta had done, shrugging so that the oversized huntsman's jacket makes him look even smaller. "Duck?"

The dog cocks its ear in spite of Mark's touch.

"Duck," Yuta agrees, and the dog's little tail wags so quickly it's a threat to everyone around.

"Cute," Mark coos, and hitches the leash dangling from his pocket to Duck's collar.

///

It's late at night, and Yuta cannot sleep, focused too heavily on the bright red numbers of his alarm clock as they blink at him. They're no accurate gauge of time; Yuta still hasn't reset them since the last time the power went out. In fact, they're only there as some form of distraction when Yuta doesn't have it in himself to break his own rules, look at his phone for a break from the insomnia that keeps him up.

Something in the house calls to him, telltale without the floorboards needing to be pried up. He's grateful, at least, for that, for the fact that sanity still stays with him even when it gets to be like this, to feel as hopeless as it had been some years ago, when he'd trained himself to accommodate the late nights that college had required of him.

It's the journal. He knows it before he even makes the move to roll out of bed, before his bare feet hit the floorboards of his ever-colder house. He'd left it in the living room the night previous, a mistake on his own part, but not one that couldn't be rectified.

It isn't that Taeyong's opinion doesn't matter. Far from it, Yuta had in fact attempted to keep himself from doing the wrong thing, reading more into it than he already had. Since he'd gotten home, stripped himself of his coat, his jacket, his scarf, he had thought of it more than a hundred times, but he could resist anything as long as it tasted of temptation, something he'd proven to himself a thousand times over the course of his lifetime. This, he had decided, was no different.

But now, unable to sleep, Yuta curls himself into a small ball on the couch, one knee to his chest as he picks up the journal, flips to a random page.

There are two concert tickets pasted into this one, and a long entry beneath. It is written in a language he knows, which is a welcome change from the gibberish he'd decided against deciphering the first time he'd read it.

The tickets are to a show he'd attended. Yuta's breath catches in his throat, something sentimental tugging at his heart. It's stupid, but he'd gone all the way to the next big city over to see them. Knowing that whoever had put this book together had very likely made that same journey makes him feel closer to the stranger in question, if only incrementally.

He can hear Taeyong chiding him already, but he turns the page.

This is completely different: a wordless entry in the record of the stranger's life, instead a drawing that makes no earthly sense. Yuta pores over it in every detail, takes in the flowers, the birds, the mishmash of trees that might be meant to represent a forest. He wonders what it might mean, what significance it might have in the stranger's life.

Never before has he wanted to bother someone he doesn't know with such intimate questions, but something tells me that whoever had composed this book wouldn't mind explaining themselves so much as Yuta wants to think they would.

He flips to another page, further down the line, and a little gasp escapes him.

To the east there are strawberry fields, miles and miles of them, stretching on infinitely into the horizon. Yuta has been once or twice with exes of his, swearing up and down it's the most romantic spot nearby for a date. He remembers packing picnic lunches with wine and disposable glasses for the atmosphere, holding hands with someone whose name he doesn't even remember by now, the scent of fruit and earth and life surrounding him entirely.

Somehow, through this person's eyes -- lens, rather -- Yuta finds the sight of his beloved fields more beautiful than he remembers them. He sighs. It's a good thing he has no intention of returning this journal, because he has no way of guaranteeing that he will not fall in love with its owner on first sight.

Heavy thoughts, those.

When he falls asleep at long last, the journal tented over his abdomen, there’s a healthy dose of fear in there amongst the good dreams and positive thoughts: the fear that he will never meet someone so good as this person, who sees the things Yuta has thought for years were only his.

///

"Good morning," greets a voice that Yuta knows, when he's still half-asleep and on the way to an early shift at the library. He can't parse it, nor can he quite lift his head for fear that the late night mixed with the caffeine hangover will produce results that make him look a snot-nosed fool. But he does, despite the effort it takes, and is met with--

"Mark," he breathes, a smile ghosting across his lips. "You told me you know this café," he adds, though he doesn't know what value it adds to the conversation, and a flush dusts itself across his cheeks. "Sorry. I'm not awake."

Mark smiles in return, and it's odd to see him another time, without the pleasant company of Duck in tow. "Can I help with that?" he asks, an eyebrow arching just slightly, and the subtleness of it catches Yuta's attention in full. "Do you want a coffee?"

"I would love a coffee," Yuta relents, though reluctantly, he too independent to let someone else take care of something like this for him. Pride, he figures as he rattles off his order.

To his credit, Mark only gets one step wrong when he brings back the drink to the table Yuta now occupies, and the hazelnut is a touch too strong, but it's fine, because Yuta would suffer a number of bad coffees if it means he gets to spend time with his new friend. "You're up early," he says, once his drink is half gone and he can claim an amount of awakeness that would not legally prevent him from getting behind the wheel of a car. "What's going on?"

"I couldn't sleep well last night," Mark admits, tugging sheepish at the collar of his coat. "And I have an appointment to meet a friend."

That's an odd way of putting that, thinks Yuta, though he doesn't comment. "What kind of friend?" he asks instead. "I've lived here forever, you're basically the only person I didn't know. Until the other day, of course." He glances out the window; the masses are beginning to awaken, one by one, two by two, marching their way round the downtown in an attempt to bring themselves to work, to life. The door of the café opens, and the cold wind that blows in shudders through Yuta the way a knife might.

"That's him," Mark says, staring over Yuta's shoulder. "Do you mind if he joins us?"

_Yes_ , thinks Yuta. "No," says his traitorous mouth, all too sweetly; it's a good thing Mark doesn't know him well, doesn't know that he doesn't say things he means in that tone of voice. "It's fine as long as I get to say goodbye to you."

Mark's eyebrow quirks again, and he smiles, the apples of his pretty cheeks showing. "Why would you have to say goodbye to me?" he asks, equal parts flirt and enigma as he rises from his seat to greet his friend.

Yuta watches Mark go over his shoulder, wrap a friend in his arms, lift him from the ground despite the difference in their sizes, and suddenly Yuta understand why he might need an appointment to see a loved one. Johnny Suh, photography professor, one of Yuta's cut-and-run one night stands the likes of which he had hoped not to run into.

This, he decides, will be nightmarish levels of awkward, and wishes he had not agreed to stay. But he knows his manners, and wants to spend time with Mark, and those two things keep him rooted to his seat, petrified by the mere prospect of the conversation to come.

"Hi," Mark says, a bit shyly, Johnny in tow. Johnny, for what it's worth, looks just as good as he had when he had peeled Yuta off that bar room floor a few years back. Having graduated he's been pretty good at avoiding facing the consequences of his actions, and staying hidden in either his house of his library he's had the good fortune of not making that mistake again.

The sad part, he reckons, is that he can't remember whether or not Johnny was any good, has no cognisance of whether or not they'd kissed there in the darkness of Yuta's otherwise lonely house.

"Hi, yourself," Yuta says, flashing a smile that cuts through himself like a winter wind, like a shard of glass he inserts directly into his heart. "Professor Suh, it's been awhile since I've seen you."

Johnny tips his head as he takes his seat, Mark trotting off, presumably to buy Johnny's drink same as he'd so lovingly done Yuta's. "You're going to call me Professor to my face?" he asks Yuta, a quirk at the corner of his mouth, and Yuta would like very much to fall between the floorboards. "What's happening?" He shuffles his fingers through the elegant sweep of his hair, loosens the scarf from around his neck. "Mark had told me he'd met someone new, but not..."

"Not the town harlot?" Yuta asks, dry, taking a sip from his coffee, which has cooled far too quickly for his liking; he needs the burn to anchor himself.

"I was going to say not the local librarian, considering I'm pretty sure he's never read a book in his time here," Johnny amends, looking apologetic, brows tenting and making him into something softer. "Be nice to him, yeah? Just because you broke me and everyone else in town into a million pieces doesn't mean he deserves all that."

"Now, when you say broke into a million pieces--" And Yuta's got so many sly turns he could take with that sentiment alone, but he keeps it to himself, if only because Mark returns with quite possibly the blackest coffee Yuta has ever seen. "Oh my god, is that diesel fuel?" he asks, and everyone gets a good laugh out of that.

Good. He can hide behind this, make his escape.

"I need to get to work soon, Mark," he says, tilting his head up toward his friend, who has not yet taken his seat. "Can I see you later? Maybe with Duck?"

"Maybe," Mark says, a bit of hesitation in his eyes. "I have some errands to run."

"I get off at three," says Yuta, like it's a promise already made. "I'll probably just hang around the dog park until you show up."

Mark shrugs. "If you want." He's back to that methodical movement, as if encased in a thousand years' of ice. Yuta wants so badly to melt that from around him, allow him the chance to be human.

He is loathe to leave the situation without at least another smile. He reaches between them, tweaks that pretty face of Mark's between his finger and his thumb, and Mark startles back just a fraction, caught off guard, vulnerability in his eyes.

"I'll be there," he says, and sweeps out the front door, allowing himself only one glance over his shoulder to see if Mark had watched him go.

The both of them are staring after him. Good. It's what he deserves, for all his effort and self-control.

Next door is the library, and he stamps his boots free of the icy slosh that has clung to his boots in the quick transit between café and work. The very dregs of his coffee still remain in the cup; Yuta sighs, wishes he'd had the forethought to get another for the work day. He'll coerce a volunteer to help him, instead.

Taeyong is already there, of course, a light to his face that hadn't been there the day before. "Good morning!" Yuta chirps in greeting, "You're looking sprightly today."

That light immediately extinguishes, and Taeyong resumes what he'd been typing on the library's ancient cataloguing computer. "What do you want?" he asks, though his tone doesn't denote the sourness in his face, lips all pinched together like Yuta's shoved a lemon into his mouth. "I'm busy doing actual work. Did you bring back the journal?"

Guilt tugs at Yuta's heart. He ignores the thinly-veiled accusation, and shrugs out of his winter coat, hangs it on the rack just behind the circulation desk. "I don't know what journal you're talking about," he lies, and it's funny that he should lie to Taeyong when he doesn't even have the gall to do it for himself.

Taeyong sighs the world's longest sigh. "You're not going to hold onto it so long I forget," he sings under his breath, like the worst lullaby Yuta could ever hear. "So you might as well bring it back."

"Has someone asked about it?" He busies himself emptying the overnight deposit box, what few books sit in it, enormous tomes about the theoretical physics of space travel, and saving food for the end times. "I mean, if someone asks about it, I'll just take a break and go back to the house and get it--"

"You won't," and Taeyong cocks his head to give Yuta a sidelong glance. "You didn't bring it back yesterday, or today, and so I figure it's as good as lost."

Yuta stares into the shiny reflective covers of the library binding, and catches sight of his own frown. Deciding it distasteful he flips open the books, removes their return date cards, tucks them into a box to be stamped again. He can already smell the ink. He is definitely not ignoring Taeyong's accusation.

"Hey, are my fines too bad to check something out?" he asks Taeyong, by way of changing the subject.

"When has that ever stopped you from stealing my override?" he asks without a moment's hesitation. "Are you going to learn about space flight?"

"Maybe," says Yuta, tucking the book beneath the counter for later.

///

Mark does not show up at the dog park, though Yuta waits for him at the lip of the man made pond until the sun disappears behind the horizon, leaves the town in a frigid blanket the likes of which seeps into one's bones as it wraps around them. It is pathetic, but the sight of other dogs does not even cheer him the way it normally might.

Yuta won't admit it, because that would be foolish of him, but he's already attached to Duck, and to Mark. His fault, he supposes, for hitching to a particular star too quickly. Not to mention he'd very much like to apologise for being an odd one this morning, for ditching as suddenly as he had.

Mark is good. Mark smiles like something out of a Hollywood romantic comedy, and does not understand how dogs work. Mark deserves better than Yuta simply leaving him behind. So he waits, day in and day out, and does not question whether or not this is the best thing for himself. 

But Mark does not come, though Yuta thinks he sees glimpses of the man in the faces of strangers. Funny how the mind compensates for that which the heart cannot have.

In compensation for his sudden broken heart, Yuta takes himself to the one bar in town at which he very rarely runs into anyone he meets, the one closest to the border between town and the city proper, where everything blends together and true townies choose not to go. The inside is warm, inviting, and already a bit noisy, people shouting over one another in feeble attempts at conversation.

Good, he thinks, hanging his head in relief. He can forget whatever's bothering him in a place like this.

The night ticks by in flashes, in shots, in Yuta paying far too much for liquor he could have consumed at home. But he doesn't mind, drinks water in between, takes good care of himself should he find he must urgently see a dog or its owner tomorrow.

When at last he makes it home, dizzied, and in someone else's car, Yuta has flirted himself out of at least three one-night stands. He reeks of alcohol where some girl had poured her drink on him as punishment for hitting on her husband. He does not regret it, feels alive in a way he doesn't get the chance to be during the day, working at a sleepy library. He nods off with his temple pressed against the glass on the long ride back to his empty house.

It's colder. He stumbles his way through lighting a small fire in the hearth. The book is there, hanging open and proudly displaying the picture of his strawberry fields. He picks it up, warms his legs through the holes in his ripped jeans as the house comes alive. The crackling of the fire provides a soundtrack.

There's tickets to a horse race the next town over, eastward, where the gamblers like to gather at an ancient track. Yuta has always wanted to go, and thinks of this person, whoever they may be, pressed up against his side as they cheer on whoever they'd deigned to put their money on.

When the liquor gets to be too much, and his eyes are too heavy, and the fire cradles him in its arms safely, Yuta must admit that the person he imagines is Mark.

///

The days go by in slow succession, their passage aided by the crawl of the sun against the horizon. Yuta knows how sad it must be, but he makes his way to the dog park every single day in the hopes that he might see Duck and, therefore, Mark.

After four days of grumping about town, Taeyong finally asks him: "What's wrong with you?" They're leaving work at the same time, having blackened their hands with the ink necessary to fill out volunteer records, both the sheets of paper that get pressed into sweaty teenage hands as well as their own.

"What do you mean, what's wrong with me?" Yuta holds open the door for Taeyong, and frowns his way through the stumbling attempt at conversation.

"You're just... off," Taeyong says, at once finding himself short of words. "I don't know how to explain it. Did you sleep with someone you shouldn't have again?"

Yuta, for the record, hates this part of any conversation, especially with Taeyong, who's been with the same person for at least a year but used to have the same routine as Yuta does now: go to bars, find someone to sleep with, end up leaving their house by daybreak.

Outside the snow has begun to fall, and Yuta prays for an end to it all. He so loathes the winter, the endless doom and gloom, the _cold_ that seeps into his bones, threatens to eradicate any and all memory of summer.

In the sky, there are flashing lights, reminiscent of fireworks set against the grey. It isn't quite the time for those sorts of celebrations, but still, he can't tear his eyes away, not even when he asks. "I just want to go home," he tells Taeyong, and it's the truth. He cannot imagine doing anything but sinking into the comfort of his bed, his stolen journal his only company.

"It's more than that," Taeyong insists, but ultimately drops the conversation. Quietly, Yuta is grateful that he doesn't find it in himself to nag about the book again. "I don't know. I'll see you tomorrow, and I hope you'll want to talk about whatever it is. You haven't been this quiet since we were working on finals, I don't think. I worry."

"I know you do," and Yuta's heart aches, just a little bit, just enough that he might apologise were there anything worth forcing out the words for. "I'll see you tomorrow. We can talk about it when I've rested."

The lights continue, all white, illuminating the otherwise dark town, still rustic enough that it uses oil lamps to keep the streets lit at night. Yuta is stuck to this spot, transfixed, trying to decide whether or not there's some strange Morse message in the intermittent flashes.

When the show finally ends, Yuta glances over to see that Taeyong is long gone, and that the prints his boots may have left in the freshly fallen snow have been erased entirely, as if he'd disappeared.

Taeyong isn't the first person he's chased away, and he won't be the last, but for some reason this time he truly is sorry.

///

In the morning, his day off, Yuta goes to the café again. Mark is not there, either, and he feels the loss like a child might feel a bellyache. He orders his usual coffee, and the barista who's been there for years offers him a smile.

"It's good to see you," he says warmly, tugging at the duck billed brim of his food service order cap. "It's been a little while. Your, um, your friend was asking for you."

Mark? Yuta's heart stutters in his chest at the potential, but doesn't ask. "When did you see him?" It's an effort, not to make a demand, but he does it nonetheless.

"I think...hm, two days ago?" The man behind the counter busies himself pumping syrup into the bottom of a cup. "My last day I was working the morning shift, anyway. He wanted to know if you'd been in, and I didn't know what to tell him."

Yuta swallows thickly, finding that the cold has dried out his throat, though it's indeterminable whether or not it's a cold of nature's making or someone else's.

"Thank you," he says, very fondly, as he takes his drink and dips his head in a humble display. "Thank you very much."

"Did you see the light show last night?" asks the barista, once Yuta has turned his back. "I was closing and saw it through the window. I think it's in the paper, even, it was so weird..."

Yuta says nothing, waves over his shoulder.

When he goes into the library, Taeyong is already there, keys jingling in his pocket and significant of the fact he hasn't been there long. He stamps his boots against the welcome mat. They're closed for business today, but Taeyong's house is too small now he's got someone living with him, and Yuta doesn't like having important conversations with his only friend in the lonely venue that's his own home.

"I made breakfast," says Taeyong, offering Yuta a plastic container with his favourites tucked neatly inside.

"I had an idea," Yuta says, eschewing the breakfast offered him much to Taeyong's dismay, "and I absolutely want to sit and talk with you, but I need to see something first. Did we already get the paper delivered?"

Taeyong nods. "Do you want me to get it for you?"

"Would you please? I'll eat, I promise, don't make that face at me." He glances down at the tupperware between his hands, the masking tape stuck to the lid reading _I'm sorry if I pushed you too hard_ in Taeyong's neat handwriting. Yuta almost admires the way they can get around the difficult emotional things like this, but only almost. He digs in, and Taeyong's cooking is his favourite, reminds him of home in a way that has nothing to do with his mother.

The paper pops up before his eyes as he's halfway through a bite of rice. "Here you go," singsongs Taeyong, like he's in a good mood. "I had something I wanted to tell you yesterday, but--"

Yuta holds up a finger, peers down at the paper with narrowed eyes, its tiny print setting his head to spinning. The headlines reads, _MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS AT TOWN'S EDGE_. Some poor investigative journalism student had been forced to investigate the site. Yuta reads with an intensity that recently he's only devoted to his journal, a laser focus. He worries, if only as a joke, that he might burn holes into the paper.

The article says that whoever had written this story just hours before print had spoken to eyewitnesses, that some tiny metal device of unknown origin had cratered the earth around 10pm. That those same witnesses saw the lights at their brightest had the breath snatched from their lungs, and that a couple of the elderly who live in that section of town have been rushed to the hospital due to heart palpitations. That the lights moved according to some algorithm the likes of which even the college mathematicians can't fully decipher.

"This is something out of a movie, right?" asks Taeyong, reading over Yuta's shoulder. "Like, the extraterrestrials have landed, they don't speak our language, they want blood for the crimes against space that earth has committed, and we're all doomed."

"I don't know," says Yuta, knowing full well what his heart tells him must be the case. "I really don't know." He folds up the paper. "I'm going to take this one home, if that's okay?"

"Yeah. There are extras. I don't even know why we get the Sunday except for records? But hey, what do I know. I'll pay you extra if you'll stay late and scan them into the archives tomorrow."

"Tell me what you wanted to tell me," Yuta implores his friend, making a display of stuffing omelet into his mouth so that he can't speak and interrupt his one and only friend. It's his way of apologising, and again, Yuta must be in awe of how they fix their problems without once addressing them.

Taeyong smiles, a bright beacon of hope in a world that might well be ending. "Yukhei proposed to me the other day," he says, offering his hand and showing a plain black band with a ribbon of rose gold shot through it, a seismographic reading of tremours. It's beautiful. Yuta must admit he is envious.

"He proposed," Yuta repeats, egg caught in his teeth when he smiles. Then he drops his chopsticks, swings his arms around his one and only friend, and fights off the feeling that he's the only one his age who'll always be alone. “Tell me everything that happened.” He lets Taeyong go, thumbing over the curve of his shoulders one last time when he draws away. “Don’t leave out a thing. I want to know.”

And Taeyong flushes, something beautiful and full of a love Yuta will never attain, and tells the story word for word.

///

In a strangely magnetic way, Yuta finds that he is drawn to the site of what the newspaper, now in its second day of coverage, is calling a meteor crash. No further mention is made of the strange metallic object that had originally been found at the landing point, though this in itself is suspicious. Yuta does not know that he will find any answers, only that this has been the only thing to wake up the sleeping town in the near-decade he’s lived and worked here, and that people eye him nervously when he reaches the site’s perimeter.

Everything is taped off by police, although he can’t imagine what the law might want to do with the landing of an unidentified flying object. He tugs his scarf tighter around his mouth, his breath escaping in enormous puffs of steam no matter what he does. He finds he likes the condensation.

What he doesn’t like is the slow trawling of other people at a place he’s considered his since before ever seeing it in person.

They’re rubberneckers, most of them, the uncultured, uneducated masses who want to say they were part of something. Yuta does not count himself among them unless it’s in the sense of physical presence, he a limb on a far grander tree of folk who want their free freakshow no matter what it costs. 

Children scatter about the site. Some of them are poorly dressed for the weather. He worries after them.

For reasons he does not have it in himself to explain, Yuta has brought the journal. The book has empty sections -- few and far between, but there nonetheless. In his estimation it’s a gift, and he’ll return the favour done unto him before at last returning it.

The site itself is about what he’d expected, the thick black scorch marks upon a ruined earth something that draws the breath from his lungs entirely. He cannot say whether the awe is earned, or if he’s simply in the headspace required to truly admire this for what it is: a natural disaster with a probably unnatural cause.

He snaps a few photos, lying in the melting snow, ignoring the way it soaks through his winter coat in favour of getting a better, more unusual angle. If someone had been kind enough to remind him of the things he finds beautiful in this podunk suburb, then perhaps he should repay that kindness, at whatever cost to himself.

He does not think he is a man obsessed, but he knows that someone in his life -- Taeyong, probably -- will be more than happy to point it out to him.

When the shot is taken and he’s made the necessary notes to accompany the photograph, Yuta packs up his gear in a battered messenger bag he’d thrifted some years before and never had a use for. He’s on his way out, ready to catch the circuit transit back home, when he runs smack-dab into the last person he expects to see here.

“Mark,” he breathes, and he can see the outline the word makes against the dimly-lit sky surrounding them.

Mark offers him a smile, a little wave. “Hi, there,” he greets, back to wooden, and Yuta has to wonder if he’s done something wrong. “You came to see what all the fuss was about, too?”

God, he’s so fucking cute, even with his ears and cheeks all pink with the wind. Yuta wants to drag him inside somewhere, insist he warm up, if only because he cares far more than is healthy and, more to the point, he hasn’t seen his new friend in far too long to be comfortable with it. The distance has made his heart grow immeasurably fonder.

“Something like that,” Yuta agrees lamely, when the silence misses its cue to end. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Aren’t you?” Mark asks, cocking an eyebrow in that sure way of his, the one that makes Yuta question everything about himself, if only because it’s so easy to fall, that way. “Let me get you a drink. Are you catching the bus back?”

“I planned on it, yeah,” Yuta says quietly, digging in his pockets for the gloves he’d abandoned in favour of the ease of his cell camera. “Unless you had a better idea.”

“Yeah, it’s called my car. C’mon, you already look halfway to death, and you’re all wet.” Without asking permission Mark takes Yuta’s hand in his, gives it a little squeeze, affectionate beyond reason, and the ice with which Yuta is covered melts right along with his heart. “I promise not to talk if you don’t want to talk.”

For what it’s worth, Yuta considers this a horrible compromise; all he wants to do is talk. It doesn’t help that the second most interesting thing that’s happened to him recently is the journal, and that he feels obligated to keep stolen secrets.

They pile into Mark’s old SUV, rubbing their respective palms together against the dying heat the car tries to build for them. “Where have you been?” Yuta asks, perhaps a bit too sharply, but the tip of his tongue catches on a canine and he stops himself from shooting off at the mouth like he wants to. He softens a touch, then decides against his better judgment to add, “I missed you.”

Mark fidgets with the fob on his keyring, just for a moment, clearly at a loss for words. “I’ve been looking for something,” he says at last, when the meter on the dash says it’s safe to turn on the heater. He does, and it blasts something cold anyhow. “Plus, I’ve been busy with projects and stuff, you know.”

Yuta doesn’t have time to wonder what it is Mark has been looking for, because in the blink of an eye Mark’s got the car in gear and is whizzing through the streets like he’ll find it by virtue of having Yuta with him on the search. “How’s Duck?” he asks, more out of politeness, he almost certain the dog had been a diversion of some sort, like how some men use babies to get attention from desperately horny women in public spaces. “Is she…”

“She’s fine. Staying with Johnny for a while. He’s going through some things.” Mark tips his head Yuta’s direction, seeming to study him. “You work at the library, don’t you?”

“I do,” answers Yuta, shifting in his seat like the answer had been a secret until just now. “What’s wrong with Johnny?”

“Oh, he saw you again,” and here Mark laughs, if only to punctuate the awkwardness of his joke with an exclamation point, make it flash bright against the grey that’s seeping in through the windows of the car. “I’m kidding. He’s just now making it through finals grading, and he could use the company, so I offered to let him babysit Duck while I’ve been busy. Remind me when I’m not driving and I’ll show you all the photos he’s sent.”

Photos. He’s reminded of the journal in his bag, and the project he’d meant to do now that he has free time. “Do you like pictures?” asks Yuta, in the vaguest way he can muster, staring out the window in abdication of any goal the question might otherwise have.

“I take a lot of them,” Mark says, “but I don’t know if I like them or not.” He laughs again, and somehow it’s more painful than the first one, but Yuta can’t say he’s met a pain he hasn’t enjoyed at least a little bit. “What about you? You were taking some over there. I saw you right before you got finished.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of becoming a freelance photojournalist if the library finally shuts down.” Yuta doesn’t say it like a joke, and has always thought about what he might do were he suddenly denied his inner sanctuary, the one place he goes for comfort that isn’t home, which doesn’t comfort him anyway.

Mark laughs nevertheless, and Yuta shifts again, reaching for the handle so that he might lean back his seat.

The drive to the café takes longer than he’d anticipated at first, though that might just be because Mark’s got this meandering way about him, like he doesn’t care how long it takes to get to the conclusion of anything. Yuta can’t help but admire that about him, wish he had a little of that himself. When at last they arrive the sun has gone down entirely, and Mark’s got this nervous energy about him, and the anticipation is thick between them. 

“Stay here a second,” Mark says softly, and exits the car first before Yuta has a chance to react. Then he’s at the passenger door, clicking it open and offering a hand for Yuta to get out. Funny. He’s still tingling with the last time they’d held hands, thinking it a mistake of sorts, an accident of the most wonderful kind, and now he’s being offered that mistake again. 

They stare at each other for a long moment before Yuta takes the hand offered him, lifts himself from the car, nearly stumbles on the dismount. Then they’re laughing, the sound surrounding their head, a nearly physical thing, an effervescence of brilliance by which they can guide themselves and stay near to one another.

The café is warm and inviting when they step inside, and they take a minute to unwind their scarves from around their necks. Yuta takes care in fitting his around the strap of his messenger bag, scans the tables to find one available for them while Mark wanders off to order them coffee. The table he ends up choosing is near the window, he intent on watching people go by while the one to whom he wants to give attention is all the way across the room.

Mark slides into the seat opposite Yuta, setting his coffee down in front of him. “Here you go,” he says softly, that shyly bright smile of his bringing light to his eyes. “Thank you, for coming with me.”

“Thank you for taking me,” Yuta murmurs, a little grin of his own playing at his lips as he watches Mark sip at a hot chocolate, a touch of whipped cream clinging to the bow of his upper lip.

Yuta flushes, glances away.

“So what have you been working on?” he asks after a while of purposeful distraction.

“Oh,” and here Mark sounds _too_ casual, watching out the window same as Yuta, “just some stuff for work. Nothing really interesting.”

“Research, for the school,” he says, reminding himself. He turns, gives Mark his full attention, the whipped cream wiped away, thankfully enough. “I think it’s really cool you do that. I tried research projects for awhile, after I graduated, but nothing was very interesting.”

“Why do you say that?” Mark frowns, reaches across the table and dusts the pad of his thumb against the corner of Yuta’s mouth. “It just depends on what you’re researching.”

“It was genealogy,” Yuta explains, trying not to flinch away from the touch. The book in his bag, pressed against his hip, is burning, a reminder of his failure, of a shame he can’t explain. “Everyone who lives here -- well, almost everyone, besides us and a few other people -- is from an old family, you know? So I didn’t get to learn a lot of things that anyone already knew. And besides, no one really wants to look up those things, not here.” He laughs softly, hopes the bitterness doesn’t come through, takes a swallow of burning-hot coffee to hide that particular feeling. “The library was just...the better option, I guess.” He glances away, eyes darting to the sidewalk. “Tell me about one of your projects?”

Here, Mark colours, a strange reaction, all things considered. “I’ve been talking to people, gathering data to help us figure out cultural movements in small towns,” he says. “Lately it’s been about aliens. The incident really helped with that.”

“About aliens?” Yuta asks with an arch of his eyebrow. “Why specifically aliens? Is it just the news?”

Mark shrugs after a long moment. “I was asking before the news.”

“Can I help?” 

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I hoped you would.” Mark flashes that grin again, and Yuta’s heart does that thing.

The door opens behind them, offering them a blustery blast of winter wind. They shudder, and inch closer together, a subtle, subconscious huddling of bodies that ends with their knees brushing under the table. The contact zips up Yuta’s spine, and he’s pleased he can blame the shivering on the cold filling the shop. “How can I help?”

Mark clears his throat, puts on a face, like he’s something official, someone who asks the questions here. “First of all, do you believe in aliens?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Yuta says airily, thoughtless; he hasn’t had to consider this since long, drunken nights with people he’d never see again.

Scooting closer, Mark’s knee comes to rest between Yuta’s. “Why not?”

“Because if there were anything else out in the stars, how have we not seen some evidence of it?” He drains a long drink from his coffee, a victory sip. “I don’t know. If there are aliens, maybe they just don’t want to be found. Do you think we want to be found by whatever’s out there?”

“Yes,” Mark says firmly. “And maybe they do. Why wouldn’t they want to be found? It can be a lonely universe, out there.” There’s something so knowing about the way Mark speaks. Yuta finds endearment in it, that his heart responds where his mouth goes dry and his teeth clack together uselessly in an attempt to find an appropriate answer. 

The knee between his nudges closer. Yuta frowns. “Are you trying to seduce me?” he asks, reaching across the table and taking Mark’s unoccupied hand in his.

“Only if it’s working,” Mark says, like he’d been expecting the question all along. Yuta, for one, had expected him to shy away. “Tell me more about aliens not making contact with us?”

And like a good interviewee, Yuta lights up, thrilled to talk about whatever topic he’s asked so long as Mark is the one directing the questions.

///

It’s midnight, when they get back to Yuta’s place.

The house is unusually warm when they stumble in, rushing a bit on caffeine, on adrenaline, on one another. They drop their things immediately, Yuta divesting himself of keys, bag, scarf, hesitating to remove his coat just yet, for fear of embarrassment: he’s been half hard the entire way home, knowing since they’d started talking, started _flirting_ that this is the only way these things end up. That shame, that enthusiasm only gets worse when Mark backs him up against his own front door. He ends up with his head caged in by Mark’s arms, palms splayed over the painted surface of the door, a finger twining in Yuta’s too-long hair.

“I need a cut,” Yuta says shyly, like he’s not waiting for Mark to kiss him, his throat exposed, chest pushed forward.

“No,” Mark insists, “keep it. You look beautiful.”

This, Yuta decides, is a curse, because he knows he’ll do whatever Mark tells him to without him even asking. He tips his head to one side, peering down into Mark’s face, searching him for intent. “You really think so?" he asks. He's too pleased at the prospect of hearing it a second time, the colour that had claimed his cheeks brushing down the column of his bare throat, warming him all the way down to the pit of his stomach where arousal begins to twist together.

In answer, Mark buries his face in the crook of Yuta's neck, lips dusting over the spot where it meets his shoulder. His teeth are sharp when they graze the outline of Yuta's collarbone and in answer Yuta furls his fingers in the collar of Mark's t-shirt, barely accessible from beneath the layers his jacket and hoodie are making.

The prospect of getting naked here, where the draft hits worst, isn't an inviting one, something of which Yuta reminds himself when he uses that grip to drag Mark further into the house. "Is this okay?" he asks, perhaps twice, when he backs Mark up against his breakfast counter, hands at his hips and a little giggle bubbling up in his throat.

Mark takes Yuta's hair in both hands, now, threading fingers through it again and again, punctuating the gestures with kisses, softer now, less desperate, more affectionate. As if they've got all the time in the world and that slow, meandering way of Mark's, the exploration of things, is more important than any destination.

They lose their coats, their overshirts, the layers peeled away with shaking hands and cast unto the floor, a collective heap at their feet which they carefully avoid when they drift around the room, chasing after one another with how much they want this, how much they need this. Yuta laughs when Mark nearly trips over his own jacket, and it breaks the tension between them, whatever anticipation had been building brought down with a simple gesture. They wrap up in one another's arms, Yuta grateful for the warmth provided him when the house threatens to chill him to the bone.

"There's no tree," Mark says, by way of not saying much at all. Yuta nods, kisses Mark again, distraction from his lack of festivity, the oddness it must seem to present to this, a relative stranger, so keen on taking in every detail when Yuta is just trying to kiss. He dips his head, brushes their foreheads together, and does it again, sipping on the drink that's gotten him dizzy, the taste of Mark's mouth on his more addictive than any liquor Yuta's been bought in years.

Yuta shudders when Mark nips at his lower lip, when his nails graze at Yuta's scalp, when they press together in just the right way that he can feel just how much Mark wants this, too. Their hips slotted, they rock together for too long a while, Yuta learning quickly the contentment that can come from a simple journey, an attempt to know each other now that they've finally met.

"You're so pretty," Mark mumbles, face so hot that Yuta can feel the burn of his cheeks, and Yuta answers with his tongue pressed to the seam of Mark's mouth, erasing the careful line they'd drawn thus far. He's always been too impatient. "Thought you were pretty when we met."

They tiptoe to the couch, wary of disturbing the gentle quiet they've established between themselves, and when Yuta perches in Mark's lap he earns himself this look, like he's all that's ever been. Their mouths meet again, again, again, and the room threatens to spin out from beneath them both as they perch here, arms wound round one another's waists, drawing closer, ever closer.

"Thought you were pretty when I saw you from across the pond," Yuta mumbles when they've both come up for air and the champagne bubbles in his heart have settled enough that he can speak, "thought you were pretty the very moment I saw you." He's snaked a hand into the hem of Mark's shirt, is trailing fingers along the shape of his stomach, the curvature of his ribcage, the soft skin of his sides. "Think you're pretty now, blushing for me." The voice he uses is a sultry one, low with the burning need to take, to give, to have that perfect, untouchable moment in which they are one and the same. "Think you're pretty when you're gone."

Mark must decide that Yuta is talking too much, kisses Yuta again, hands at the sides of his neck, thumb dragging over his pulse so slowly that it's a tease, an attempt to promise something they can't keep.

"Don't keep leaving," Yuta says, his whisper breathless, his chest heavy with his attempt to steal the very breath from Mark's lungs. "Don't do it. I don't like it."

And Mark nods, and kisses Yuta again, a dozen times now, quick little pecks that trail down the side of his face, to his jaw, to the spot behind his ear. "I won't." 

It's a stupid promise to make, Yuta knows it the entire time, but as they fumble to strip one another from their clothes, to lie naked and touching on his gently peeling couch, he can't help but believe it. The little wounds that Mark peppers along his clavicle, his sternum, the gentle swelling of his ribcage are the seals that bind them to this, whatever it might be in the end of things. 

Gone now is the aimless wandering of hands, Mark a learner by nature -- something Yuta has gathered from the gentle stretches of silence between them, back at the café where they’d shared more intimacy than coffee -- and eager to build his database. He touches Yuta with great purpose, hand splayed over the curve of his belly, dipping lower in purposeful trails of fingers. When he finally touches Yuta, relieves some of the throbbing ache that has taken a night to build between his parted thighs, it’s like going to heaven without any control over his ascension, some otherworldly beam dragging him up toward the sky.

“Let me suck you off,” Yuta moans, hips canting into the gentle caress of Mark’s circled fingers, the expert twist of his wrist. “Right now, please, I want to--”

And before he knows it he’s in the floor, knees cold against the hardwood, his cheek pillowed on Mark’s thigh and Mark’s intentional grip in his hair. When he takes the head of Mark’s cock between his kissed-cranberry lips, the sound he earns himself is enough that he has to reach between his own legs to find relief of his own making.

Mouth full, stretched, warm and wet, Yuta rolls his tongue, and he hears his new favourite song again. He strokes himself with fervour, body unsure which direction it’s going, whether he’s gravitating toward Mark, toward his own hand, toward whatever this union ends up being. There is no thought of the future here, just the satisfying, low throb of his own jaw, accommodating every inch of Mark, and the tickle of salt at the back of his throat.

Mark comes first, a cried-out warning signal, a tightening hand in Yuta’s hair. Yuta’s never been much for this but he looks up at Mark, eyes round and shining with the effort of it all, and gives the nod.

He had not known the extent to which he had wanted a mouth full of Mark’s cum until it fills him. It is all that Yuta knows, when he finally collapses, seed spilled across his stomach, his crooking knuckles, craving still for the touch of the lover he’s taken, pined after for a solid week in his absence.

Mark looks so beautiful, sweat beading his forehead, a little trace of distress still in the expanse of his forehead. Yuta climbs up onto the couch, grateful for the warmth between them as he soothes Mark’s brow with his lips, still sticky, still red. Mark kisses Yuta first, and Yuta kisses him back, like Mark will be gone again in the morning if he does not treasure this moment for what it's worth.

"Next time," Mark says, and it's a leading sentence which does not have a follower. Yuta offers to make dinner while disappearing into the bathroom to find something with which to mop them up, although his lascivious ideas are those of cleaning up after them with his mouth instead, to take a moment to enjoy their coupling as much as he can. The only thing that stops him is the fear of judgment. Mark, to him, is something precious, a lost book, a metal contraption in the middle of a meteorite-burned field, an engagement that he cannot deny even if he wants to.

All too late, Yuta remembers who he is, and that by virtue of being himself he'll have to get rid of Mark, having slept with him too soon rather than savoured the touch of his fingertips, the fulfillment of feeling the heft of his cock against Yuta’s tongue. This is not like his one-night stands, his married men and photography professors and dalliances for when he gets bored or lonely. This is something, though he cannot quite name it, standing here in the bathroom, the draft of his home tickling at the small of his back the way a dear lover might.

He stares into the mirror a long while. Mark had told him his long hair was pretty. Right now, with it sweat-damp and clinging to his forehead, he supposes it just might be. Then he disappears back into the living room and tenderly offers Mark a second rag, separate from the one he'd used to clean up himself. _I care about you,_ it says, though his mouth doesn't quite do the job, too swollen, and his voice too sore from trying to hold back the scream of Mark's name that tried to claw its way out from between Yuta's vocal cords when he’d reached his own climax.

He doesn't end up making dinner, the both of them tired by the act of being together, the excitement of the day. They don't have to talk about it; it's clear in the slow way Mark takes care of himself in the post, the meandering he does in just climbing to his feet, wrapping Yuta in his arms, kissing the column of his throat a last time. Though neither of them have any inclination to put their clothes back on, it's cold inside this poor, old house, and thus Yuta has a suggestion: "Sleep here tonight."

Mark arches a brow, subtle, questioning.

"Hear me out. It's late. I don't know where you live but I don't think it's around here--" Yuta lavishes in the laugh that draws from Mark, ragged. "I think it's further than you want to say, and that's fine. But I don't think I'd live with myself too well if I just let you go home."

There it is: the raw honesty he tries to keep from people, that he hides in a mostly-abandoned library, a plainly-empty house. He shrinks away from his own words, forcing distance between their clinging bodies with his fingertips resting against the crooks of Mark’s elbows.

"Maybe I wanted to stay over anyway," Mark challenges, grinning so big that he lights up the entire room even in this small space between the pair of them, and Yuta's always been fond of the light, but it's different when it's emanating from this person he wants to keep with him forever. Encapsulating. He feels he might be being led to something, though he can't say what that is, either, and his own speechlessness is hurting him more than he lets on.

They curl up beneath Yuta's heavy blanket, holding hands where someone a bit more sentimental might wish to be entangled, and Yuta does his best to sleep. But when he closes his eyes, he's too aware of Mark's breathing, the gentle caress of it against his cheek, and he cannot sleep, cannot think, can only listen to the sound of rising and falling breath as it takes up the entire room.

The ritual he's kept for nights now occurs to him. Guiltily, he rolls out of Mark's arms, ignoring the way Mark whimpers, makes grabbing hands at the outline of where Yuta had just been laying. "I'll be back," he promises in a whisper.

He lingers in the doorway for a long, long moment, watches the way Mark's face relaxes, slow and steady, and tells him in a quiet way that he'll be back, a second time, making it a promise. The way Mark is lit, a thin sliver of moonlight catching the angles of his face as it peers in between the barely-parted curtains of Yuta's bedroom, steals the breath from Yuta's lungs in a way for which he doesn't have words.

The book is still in his bag, and he's still got his project in mind when his fingers brush the gentle cracks in the spine. He draws it from beneath the flap with a trembling hand, flips it open with the same reverence he had shown to Mark's body earlier in the evening. He hasn't marked any pages to keep his place in his reading, too afraid that he will in time have to return the book, and that whoever it belongs to will know how poorly he's treated the thing. Eventually he finds his place, and breathes a little sigh of relief. Though he's in the living room, far from anywhere that might disturb Mark's sleeping, he still lights his reading by his phone, and thumbs through pages one by one, taking in every unreadable word, every photograph, every ticket stub and local restaurant review and printed photo of a celebrity.

The last photo he looks at is of the library, and Yuta wonders if perhaps he is somewhere in the spirit of this picture, hidden behind the walls but impacting it with his energy all the same. It's also the last entry, the end of the project before a thieving magpie had snatched it up for his own gain. Yuta stares at the front doors he knows, the faint glimmer of fall setting over it, the light catching through the blazing foliage. It looks both alive and empty, a body without a ghost to inhabit it, an experiment without an attending scientist.

The only thing to do when you finish a book you love is to read it again. Yuta knows this, has well-thumbed books on his shelves that he's stolen from the stacks over the years with no intent of returning; they sing to this inherent truth of his. So he closes the book, stares into its embossed cover, and promises himself he'll read more in the morning.

When he creeps back to bed, eyes focused on Mark's sleeping form the entire time, Yuta is pinged with a sense of guilt that shoots, like a heart attack, all the way down his arms. He could love the author of this project, he knows, with a knot in his stomach. He could share those things, those places and experiences, with this person, were he only brave enough to find out who they are. Taeyong's nagging fills him for a moment, and he wants nothing more than to make that stop, if only he knew how.

He could love that person, that stranger.

But he could love Mark, too, someday, and can already see what their life might be like if they were together: the long walks with Duck, the evenings of Yuta making dinner and Mark talking about his research, whatever that research is, the long nights of talking about the great mysteries of the universe. Mark will always get Yuta's coffee order a little wrong, and Yuta will always ask too many questions, and they'll hold hands when they're afraid and can't say anything about it.

He sees it so clearly it nauseates him, if only because he knows now that he is not in a position to make a choice, and that Mark will disappear again, that it's only a matter of time.

Mark makes a tiny noise in his sleep.

Yuta dips his head, kisses his brow, and snuggles in for the night.

He hasn't looked at his alarm clock once.

///

The morning comes.

Mark has crept out in the night at some point, or Yuta has overslept. His phone says he's got a few missed calls from Taeyong, probably asking him whether or not he's going to come into work today. He will, and texts to say as much, but it's a distracted effort, his phone sandwiched between layers of blanket before he really has a say in it.

The bed beside him is still warm. It cannot have been that long. Why couldn't Mark wake him? A thousand reasons run through his mind, and yet, he cannot think of a single one that might be considered reasonable.

He's done it again, and knows it, and is sick with that knowledge. He's ruined whatever could have been. His blasted impatience. He bites his lip and tries not to scream, if only in the vain hope that Mark has simply stepped out.

The living room, when he finally wraps his blanket around himself, is empty, devoid of the presence to which Yuta has already become accustomed. He sniffs his affront.

On the table, he looks for the book first, drawn to it now just the same as he had been on the day he found it. It does not exist, or he does not see it, and he peeks under every piece of furniture in this room, trying to find it.

Could Mark have taken it? Yuta wonders, blinking back his displeasure, which threatens to overflow at the eyes. He wouldn't have. Something tells Yuta this, though he doesn't know what.

Still, it's gone. He wonders if perhaps he misplaced it, if in his half-awake state the night prior he'd simply put it on the shelf like he does all his other books. No time. He'll deal with it later. For now he drags himself to the bathroom, ignoring the incessant chiming of his phone. Perhaps he won't go to work today, though he can't think of a justified reason for doing so. He's never called in a day in his life, shown up to the circulation desk with a snotty nose and the reddest eyes imaginable on a human. Nothing has ever stopped him.

Should heartbreak be the reason?

Mark doesn't turn up in the house, and Yuta is sure his heart has a hairline fracture. He texts Taeyong and says that he's got something to do, and didn't he tell Taeyong that the other day? It's an unkindness, and he knows it, but he can't help himself, the impulse to find his answers far too strong.

He climbs back into bed, no intention of doing anything save mourning what could have been.

///

After three days without contact, three entire twenty-four-hour cycles of worrying what it was he’s done wrong -- he _knows_ , of course, his track record speaking for itself, skipping under scrutiny -- Yuta knows he has to do something, find someone to talk to about this.

First he asks Taeyong, who gives him a look, barely noticeable considering he doesn’t bother lifting his head much out of his wedding planner. “I’m not surprised,” he says, once Yuta has explained the problem. “Remember that nice boy you were fucking around with back in college? What was his name?”

“Jaehyun,” Yuta intones sullenly, shelving the books to be sent back to other libraries and refusing to look his friend in the eye.

“As soon as you slept with him he disappeared. No one’s ever heard from him again.”

“Okay, well, don’t say it like I _killed_ him--”

“You sort of did. He graduated so quietly and moved away. It was like a ghost of him was still left behind.”

Yuta groans, drags his unoccupied hand down the contours of his face. “I don’t kill people with my dick, dude,” he says, a little less insistent this time. “Johnny’s still around. I haven’t killed him.”

Taeyong snorts, busies himself with writing down some unnamed list of expenses. Yuta thinks to tell him he’s doing his math wrong, but then decides better of it, vengeance for ridicule. “Johnny was a ghost before you ever met him,” he says, matter-of-fact, scribbling in his planner.

At the very least this takes root in his brain, the thought of Johnny meeting up with Mark in the coffee shop, schedule clear. “Hey, can I go on a break?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s not like you’re doing anything, anyway,” says Taeyong, sullen, still not looking up from his work in any way that matters. “Be careful out there.”

Yuta smiles over his shoulder as he zigzags out the front door, his coat an afterthought, the collar gripped tightly in his hand but never quite something he wears. He ducks into the café next door, breathes in the scent of coffee beans that makes nostalgia linger light on the fringes of his consciousness. He asks the barista -- mysteriously, the one who had been there the night of he and Mark’s date -- whether or not he’s seen Mark around.

The shrug he gets in return is indifferent at best, and Yuta’s heart sinks. In recompense for the trouble, for the sure insanity in his eyes that finds him deserving of this lukewarm a reaction, he orders two coffees, one for him and one for Taeyong, who’s sure to need it if he’s the only one working on he and Yukhei’s wedding (he is). 

After dropping the drink off to his friend, another promise to be safe spilling from his lips, Yuta knows the only logical place left to go. His legs carry him without his knowledge or consent, he sipping on the slightly-wrong order he’s almost accustomed to Mark ordering for him.

It’s weak, and he knows it, but he misses Mark in a way that doesn’t have a name.

The university campus looks different in winter; he remembers it, but only in the vaguest sense, the memories foggy, seen through a veil of drunkenness that Yuta has yet to achieve as a degreed adult. Yuta tromps through the snow, ignoring the cold that shivers round the nape of his neck, his hair pulled up in a tiny tail. He's on a mission, now that he's gotten the day off, Taeyong more busy with wedding planning than he ever could be doing library work and sending his blessing.

_I love you,_ Taeyong reminds him, and even through text Yuta knows the sincerity of it, makes a face at the mushiness. He sends a long string of hearts back anyway, knowing that Taeyong treasures these sorts of things.

The path to the arts building -- tiny and pathetic as it is, this being a place of science, of industry rather than encouraging young people to follow their creative passions -- is a winding one, and the branches of the trees, nude for the season, reach out to block his path. Someone must be slacking. It must be the holidays. He can hear the telltale toll of bells in the distance: the sound of the various winter pageants and church services that mean landscapers are visiting their loved ones rather than their places of business.

Johnny's office is a tiny one, barely bigger than a closet, and it's stacked high with papers that Yuta can barely see through when he peers into the blinded window. He knocks on the door, waits for an answer, knocks again. There's no guarantee that Johnny is even there, he probably one of those visiting a loved one. Yuta tries and fails to remember some errant detail Johnny had accidentally given him during their night together, but the entire thing is a blur, and he doesn't care to delve that deep into something he's clearly meant to have forgotten.

The door opens at the third knock, Johnny looking sullen and, for all intents and purposes, _hung over_. Yuta quirks a smile, tips his head. "You alright, Professor?" he asks, in that dry voice of his, the one that had drawn the biggest laugh out of Johnny the night they'd met and parted.

Johnny just steps aside, like he's been waiting for Yuta to come to him for weeks and only just realised it. Yuta enters, glances around, realises it's practically pitch-black. "You know this isn't a darkroom, right?"

A second question unanswered. Yuta, for a moment, has to wonder what it is he's doing here, but this is the only connection he's got, and it's better than doing nothing at all.

"You have to understand," says Johnny when he takes a seat, kicking back in his office chair and propping his chocolate-coloured dress shoes on the desk, "that I don't usually get a lot of people coming here asking me...anything."

"That isn't true," Yuta counters, cramming himself into a wingback chair that Johnny had clearly brought in for the aesthetic and with no regard for space for human legs. "You're literally here for people to ask you about their assignments."

This does earn Yuta a laugh. Goodness, but Johnny is beautiful when he laughs, like a whole other person whose life has yet to be ruined by the prospect of teaching. "What are you here for?" he asks, folding his hands over his stomach.

"How close are you to Mark?" May as well cut to the chase. Yuta's never been good about beating around the bush, especially when he already knows what he wants, and has no inclination toward entertaining Johnny, who looks like he could use all he can get. “Don’t look at me like that.” He screws up his nose, attempting not to wilt under the judgment.

“I’m closer to him than you are, probably,” Johnny says, “but I don’t see why you’d drag yourself from work all the way to here just to ask me that.” He crosses one ankle over the other, probably in conservation of space. “It doesn’t make sense, you know?”

“I like him,” Yuta blurts out, and Johnny’s eyebrows raise. “I like him a lot, and I like his dog, and-- how’s Duck, by the way?”

“Duck’s fine.” Johnny glances around the office like he’s about to spill a secret. “Mark went home.”

_For the holidays_ , Yuta’s mind supplies in a show of complete unhelpfulness. “He… I don’t know if he took it, but there was something at my place, the last time he came over, and I can’t find it,” Yuta tells Johnny, the words coming out all stilted and confused, slowed by the cold, by his own reluctance to be vulnerable in front of a man who’s seen him low in the first place. “I wanted to know if maybe he’d seen it.”

Johnny, for the record, looks at him like some strange mutant animal with a second head and a short lifespan. “He won’t be back for a long time,” he says slowly, “if he comes back at all. Were you the one who had his book?”

What? Yuta barely catches the word before it slips out of his mouth, all incredulity and disgust. “What book?” He thinks of the journal, now lost to him, and wonders for a brief moment how it could be possible that Mark had been the one to put down all of Yuta’s favourite things in one place. That hunger for knowledge must have run deep. It must still. He curses himself for thinking of Mark like he’s dead, hangs his head in something like shame.

Johnny inspects him a long moment, probably for honesty. Yuta meets his eyes, guilt in his own, if the heaviness of his heart is any indication.

“The photography project. For his research? He almost got into a lot of trouble over losing that, you know.” Johnny taps his finger against the bridge of his nose. “I know you like him, and that’s fine, but you can’t just take things from people. Not if it gets them in trouble.”

Yuta laughs, a harsh, forced sound accompanied by a roll of his eyes. “You sound like someone I know. If you don’t mind telling me how I can reach him--”

“You can’t,” Johnny tells him with a long-suffering sigh, “but I get the feeling you’ll see him before me, so tell him to come pay me a visit when he gets back? I’m still taking care of the dog, after all.”

This is a goodbye, a subtle removal from office, and Yuta wants to ignore it, to ask more questions that he feels Mark might never get the chance to answer himself. But he does as he’s volunteered, exits Johnny’s office in a flurry, a hundred thousand thoughts clustered like stars and rattling around his skull.

///

Christmas and New Year’s come and go without Yuta paying them much notice. He cleans his house, finds the source of the draft, a tiny open vent that he doesn’t remember having seen when he moved in. He closes it, and the house finally breathes its warmth onto him.

The bed is empty, but the sheets are clean. He hasn’t thought of Mark in a couple days, now, not in any substantial way. His body, occupied by collecting dust from every corner, crack and crevice of his home, doesn’t give his mind the space or time it needs to process what Johnny had told him.

At last, though, Yuta finishes his task, and when he collapses into bed, unshowered and exhausted to the core, he has the time. He has the space.

_He won’t be back for awhile, if he comes back,_ Johnny had said, and Johnny isn’t a person who speaks of things about which he’s unsure. Yuta doesn’t remember much about him, but he knows that for certain, and the idea 

Staring at the ceiling, Yuta runs through their brief conversation again, dragging a hand over his face like it’ll erase the years’ worth of worry from his skin. He catches a brief, watery glimpse of his reflection in his bedroom window, swears he sees his face as something pallid, and closes his eyes.

For the first time in a long time, he falls asleep without meaning to. His dreams are made of Mark, of the softness of his hands, the firm grip he uses when he takes Yuta by the nape to draw him down into a kiss. It’s summertime, and they’re in the strawberry fields at the edge of town.

_I missed you,_ says this dream version of Mark, who smiles like he’s never had a problem in his life, all that robotic, procedural conversation erased from his speech. It feels wrong in Yuta’s stomach -- Yuta, who has liked him for all that he is, all the strangeness with which he shamelessly presents himself.

Yuta has never been shameless in his life, but when he rolls on top of Mark, the blanket beneath them crunching against the arid grass, he thinks that perhaps he could be. 

But then he wakes, before he fumbles open the first button on Mark’s dress shirt, and he finds himself grabbing at something he can no longer reach.

It is the middle of the night, and the snow outside is the hardest of the season thus far, but he shrugs into layers upon layers, toes into his boots, and trudges all the way to the crash site. By the time he makes it there a thin, shivering dawn has crested over the buildings looming distant against the horizon.

Yuta lays in the fresh piles of snow and wishes more than anything that he were not some ill-starred, wretched wraith, unworthy of having one thing in this dead-end college town that makes him happy.

But self-pity, he determines as the snowflakes stick to his eyelashes, is a luxury he cannot afford.

Taeyong is the one who comes to pick him up from the crash site, a confused but eager Yukhei in tow. It’s Yukhei, in fact, who helps Yuta from the snow, dusts him off, checks him over for signs of hypothermia. Yuta can’t recall having met him before, though he’s sure he has, back in the days when he and his only friend had still been barflies and partners in crime.

“Are you alright?” asks Yukhei, because it’s the sensible thing to ask.

And Yuta, he just laughs and laughs and laughs.

///

Weeks go by, January melting into early February without much notice from Yuta or, more noticeably, from anyone around him. Class starts again, and Yuta and Johnny run into each other at the café sometimes. They smile, nod, perfunctory actions, but it gives Yuta hope that perhaps he isn’t as cursed as he thinks he is, that his kiss isn’t one of death and destruction but rather coincidental departure.

He’d never meant to be a harbinger of goodbye but, he supposes, that is his lot in life, same as he’s meant to be the town miser, the ghost, the spirit that haunts the places no one really wants to go. 

The papers occasionally report on the old crash site, the way the community has banded together for the first time in history to repair the land there. They’re not happy with the way the earth is still warm from impact, the ugliness of it all burned to tar, its trees no longer taking in water from the snow as it drains into the soil. They’ll stay bare forever, say the researchers from the school, caught up in their samples and their gloves and their enigmatic half-grins, depicted in grainy newspaper photographs far from the front page.

Yuta will miss the site now that it won’t be accessible to civilians, and for a moment considers going to help fix it, too. But then he thinks of Mark, and his heart aches, and he can’t stomach the idea of ruining the place they’d had their first, their only date. Instead of focusing on that he throws himself into work, what little there is, goes home with stamp ink staining him beneath the edges of his fingernails.

He still hasn’t cut his hair. He doesn’t know that he ever will, right now. 

The nights he spends alone are ones left to his thoughts. Though he doesn’t think much of a mourning widow, in retrospect he considers himself one, sequestered at home for some prescribed and societally appropriate amount of time. Once in awhile he’ll laugh at himself. It wasn’t like Mark was his boyfriend, after all, just some mysterious crush he’d caught in the winter only to have it fade with the thaw.

On the day the repairs begin and local farmers at the outset of town move in to break ground, till it, make it new and beautiful again, Taeyong tells him the bad news. “We’re being transferred,” he says in his most deadpan voice, and Yuta’s grateful not to have the room to accuse his friend of making jokes. “To the city, I mean. This branch just doesn’t do it for them, I guess.”

Left at a crossroad, Yuta wants to ask, _what do you think I’m supposed to do?_ But Taeyong has this great big life ahead of him, and Yuta has only damnation that seeps from between the hairline cracks in his skin. “I’ll see,” he says, like he has a choice: it’s either transfer and keep working, or go to teaching alongside the likes of Johnny Suh and every other teacher in this town he’s fucked, or fall off the grid completely. He can’t decide which sounds appealing.

“Please come with me,” Taeyong tells him, gloved hands cupping his cheeks. “We still have a month here, but… I want you to come with me. If you can.”

Yuta wants nothing more than to stay here, rooted to this spot on this threadbare carpet, in a building that he has come to love as one does a dear friend’s home. It is not always his, and he is not always welcome in it, but he has carved out a space inside its spirit.

Though he does not say it, he wants to stay here until Mark returns, so that at least something is familiar to him.

His heart tugs, but Yuta does not say no, though his mouth threatens to do the job for him when Taeyong walks away.

///

The alarm clock blinks its angry red reminder of the wee hours of morning in Yuta’s face. He has not slept in days, doesn’t feel much like sleeping when it’s been months of this aching loneliness. He had tried to go back to the bar, the one he frequented when he did not feel like being himself, but the only thing he could think to ask that wasn’t some overused pickup line was whether or not someone believed aliens existed.

He’s not sure of his answer himself, these days.

The exhaustion wracks him, harder with every breath, he left shivering beneath his blankets. He misses Mark. He misses smiling and laughing, can’t remember the last time he’d done much of either in a way that hadn’t been forced. 

When the crash happens, he takes it for some strange hallucination, a sign of sleep deprivation. The earth rocks beneath him, sure to fissure; he whimpers from his tiny space beneath the blanket, braces himself for his house to collapse. No such thing happens, of course; this is not one of the scenes from his well-worn paperbacks, the corners turned in to mark a page, a scene of utter destruction. Nothing much happens at all, besides the impact, the burning of the old oak tree which his real estate agent had kindly told him was a selling point when he’d bought the little old house.

Trembling, Yuta steps outside. The snow has not ceased for days, and he is barefoot, but he must know what it feels like to be the first person to witness the end of things. At least then he’ll know what to tell the reports when they flock to his home.

There, in the middle of his backyard, sitting perched perfectly atop a large metal sphere that hums and whirs with activity, is a figure that Yuta is sure he’s seen before.

_Mark,_ his heart whispers angrily, flooding with questions that have been held back by social convention and cowardice. He runs toward the sphere, the circumference of its crater the only thing that keeps him from approaching properly. “Mark!” he shouts against the wind, the crackling of the fire. 

And that figure, impossibly, looks his way. He is ethereal, lit by the blaze that surrounds them, the destruction of Yuta’s home, the angles of his face caught in golden glow.

In its hands -- his hands, because Yuta knows that there is no way this isn’t Mark sitting atop what he assumes to be some sort of spacecraft -- is clutched a familiar leather book, gold-leathered, a gift to which Yuta had never been entitled.

Yuta calls over the white noise din, “Where have you been?” And he wants to cry, but he’s grinning, a loon in a man’s clothing.

Mark holds up the book. “They liked it,” he tells Yuta from his high-on perch, gesturing with his other hand toward the heavens, “but they liked hearing about you better.”

///

The newspaper folk come sooner than the police or the fire department do. It’s fine, Yuta tells himself as he wraps Mark in a blanket, secrets him away in the bedroom while he makes his statements. He knows that he is owed an explanation, and perhaps he’ll get it sometime in the future, but for now he’s got to deal with officials.

They’d question it, this second incident, if they saw how Mark speaks, how he carries himself now that his human battery has worn down.

He answers their queries dutifully, though without much thought, too busy occupying himself with the notion that Mark is only a room away. If he flushes a couple times throughout the conversations with the police, the papers, the firefighters, he presumes they’ll just blame it on stress. It’d be hard for anyone, they’ll reason, and he’ll let them. 

When at last everyone has left, and it is just he and Mark alone, he climbs into bed.

“Do you believe in aliens?” Yuta asks the darkness that surrounds them, the fire doused and no longer lighting up their room.

Mark laughs and, oh, it’s the sweetest sound. “How could I not?” he asks between heavy huffs of giggling breath. “I’m one of them.”

And Yuta, he had known this, somehow -- he must have, because the admission is far from a surprise on his part. He seals this particular determination with a kiss, dusted gentle over the corner of Mark’s smiling mouth, then another to his cheek for good measure. “The research…” he begins, hesitating.

“It’s for them. For us. For me. Just me.” He doesn’t seem to want to talk much about this besides, and Yuta wants to know _why_ , but knows the way questions like that don’t get answers better than most people do. 

“You don’t look like the little green guys in the films.” Yuta points it out with a somberness that makes Mark laugh even harder. 

“You don’t look like the humans my mother warned me about.” And he kisses Yuta, reaching between them to press a palm to Yuta’s heartbeat, strong beneath his sternum. “But I like you anyway.”

“Johnny said you might not be coming back,” Yuta murmurs, lips barely moving and face burning with the weakness of it all. He hates admitting the things he’d done, the person he’d been in Mark’s absence. “I don’t know how he knew that.”

“Johnny knows a lot of things that human beings aren’t supposed to know,” Mark mutters darkly, burying his face in the crook of Yuta’s neck and tracing shapes into his skin. “It’s that damn photographer’s eye. He gave it to me, and I had to give him something in return.”

For just a moment, Yuta is jealous of Johnny, but it’s only a flare, alleviated by the gentle kick of blankets that he might drag his cold, cold ankle along the muscle of Mark’s blanket-warmed calf. “Are you going to leave again?”

“Probably,” says Mark softly, muffled by skin, fabric, embarrassment that is there but only in trace. “But I came back for you. Johnny was right. I wasn’t supposed to come back.”

_For me?_ Yuta wants to ask, but it’s too much too soon, and he’s so tired, not used to the excitement of having so many people over at once. He slides his arms around Mark’s waist, clings tightly, no longer convinced that he’s never been liked, no longer worried about shame. For now, this is enough to carry him through the night.

He closes his eyes, and he sleeps, lulled by the sound of Mark’s gentle snoring, his mumbling in a language that Yuta has never heard, and for which he’s sure there’s no translator.

///

In the spring, when the last traces of winter have faded into the soil and the conservationists have gotten heavy into their restoration efforts, they go to the strawberry fields. It is a place that Yuta has, without meaning to, come to think of as theirs, belonging to no one else. They roll out one of Yuta’s fluffy blankets and lay side by side, hand in hand. 

“Do you know how I knew I liked you?” he asks, gazing up at the sky, warm with the weight of Mark’s gaze on him. “You had a photo of this place. I had never really given it to anyone, and you had found it all on your own.”

In answer, Mark rolls closer, kisses the shell of Yuta’s ear, a leg hooking over his hips. “I found you all on my own,” he says, low in his throat, and he’s so fucking irresistible that Yuta rolls closer, too. “You’re mine. My greatest discovery.”

Yuta, for one, supposes that he is.

**Author's Note:**

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